Open Source

Promoting greater use of and contribution back to Open Source Software (OSS) projects has always been one of OFE’s primary objectives. We believe that OSS is a powerful tool supporting innovation as well as economic growth. In particular, OFE has long been promoting OSS in the public sector as a way to help avoid vendor lock-in, maintain flexibility, and to achieve good value-for-money.

OFE works closely with a number of open source/free software focused organisations, such as the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) with whom it has a long term partnership, to ensure that the specific needs of Open Source are well represented throughout OFE’s policy work and in the work of the European Commission and Parliament. In the past this has evidenced through preparatory work on the European Interoperability Framework, the Public Procurement Guidelines, European Standardisation reforms and definitions, and Intellectual Property discussions.

OFE is a partner, together with the FSFE, in a Erasmus + project funded by the European Union to promote the uptake of Free and Open Source Software in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises by developing a training course. You can find more information on the project on the project website FOSS4SMEs.eu.

Latest from OFE on Open Source

What is Open source?

Open Source Software (aka. Free Software) is software that has the following characteristics:

Everyone can run the software, for any purpose.

Everyone can study how the software functions, and change it so it functions as they wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Everyone can redistribute copies in order to help others.

Everyone can distribute copies of their modified versions to others.

Both the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) maintain more elaborated definitions. These definitions differs in the details but are largely equivalent. The FSF definition is the basis for the GPL license, the best known and most widely used open source software license while OSI maintains a list of open source licenses they consider compliant with their definition.